Robert Bird - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works.

In the same series

Robert Bird

REAKTION BOOKS

For Robert Louis Jackson

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2012

Copyright Robert Bird 2012

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bird, Robert, 1969

Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Critical lives)

1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 18211881.

2. Novelists, Russian 19th century Biography.

I. Title II. Series

891.733-dc23

eISBN 9781861899354

Mikhail Panov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, photographed in 1880.

Dostoevsky once asked his friend Stepan Yanovsky, a doctor and amateur phrenologist, to examine his cranium for insight into his character. In the shape of Dostoevskys skull and in his image with tightly clenched lips Yanovsky discerned a marked similarity to Socrates, reflecting a shared understanding of the soul of man. As his fame grew in the 1870s, Dostoevsky frequently declined admirers requests for his photograph, claiming (disingenuously) that he had not sat for a portrait for many years. Dostoevskys ambivalence suggests that his image presented him with mysteries as well.

No less today the divide between Dostoevskys compelling creative persona and his troubling human guise continues to be an intellectual, spiritual and even erotic provocation. Readers probe every photograph, every portrait and even posthumous likenesses of Dostoevsky for insight into his powerful, enigmatic works. To see how elusive Dostoevskys face has proven for artists, just take a glance at the covers of Western editions of his works and of books about him. The only recognizable feature is often the presence of a beard, no matter what shape; it might as well be Rasputin. Thiswas a revolutionary who exchanged cordial notes with the imperial family and their most brutal henchmen, a metaphysician best known for his chatty journalism, an ardent Christian dogged by accusations that he (like Socrates) was corrupting the young.

Some of the stereotypes that have been imposed upon Dostoevsky were no doubt encouraged by aspects of his own life and work. Consider the following description by Comte Eugne-Melchior de Vog (18481910):

[Dostoevsky has] the face of a Russian peasant, a true Muscovite muzhik: a squashed nose, small eyes flashing beneath high arches of his eyebrows and burning with a flame now gloomy, now tender; a high brow, furrowed by ruts and protrusions, deeply-set temples that seem to be carved out by the blows of a hammer; and all of these features are drawn and distorted, collapsing towards his pained mouth. Never have I seen on the face of a man the expression of such accumulated suffering; it was as if all the trials of his soul and his flesh had left their seal.

This description is obviously over-determined by Dostoevskys reputation as a Russian nationalist and, in the autobiographical Notes from the Dead House, as the first writer to open a window onto the Russian penal colonies. It projects onto the writer the anxious features of such Dostoevskian protagonists as Raskolnikov, Rogozhin and, most of all, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. There is a kind of justice in this; after all, not only did Dostoevsky give the Karamazov patriarch his own Christian name, but he also jotted in his final notebook: We are all nihilists [...] We are all Fyodor Pavloviches. No doubt Dostoevskys face can serve as a mirror for his protagonists, but they are clearly reflected in it only when they turn away from us, their readers. The more we search for Dostoevsky in his works or for the meaning of his works in his life the further he and they slip from our grasp.

Dostoevskys resistance to categorization underscores his fundamental role in articulating the historical turn from a law-based, Euclidian universe to one that could accommodate not only a theory of general relativity, but also the logical quandaries of quantum mechanics. He exempted nothing from radical doubt, making him an unreliable ally for any ideological or religious orthodoxy. The despicable Lebedev in Dostoevskys The Idiot (18689) interprets the third horseman of the Apocalypse who carries a pair of scales in his hand (Revelation 6:5) as representing the spirit of the modern age, where everything is based on the measure and the contract, and everyone is seeking his rightful share. Dostoevsky designed his apocalyptic fictions as measures of the infinite potentials of humans, for good or for ill, beyond any familiar scale. We his readers have remained slow to measure up, still desiring to contain his works within comfortable truths and ideas, pro or contra. We still need a more sophisticated, quantum account of the relationship between Dostoevskys person and his works. Thankfully, since he understood very well just how radical his artistic project was, we can draw guidance in this task from Dostoevskys own theories of the word and the image.